SAFE PERIMETER

Safe Perimeter is an introspective project, a convention agreed upon by the six artists in order to conjoin the past and present within this protective grid. Simultaneously ambiguous and normative, Safe Perimeter is equivalent to an exchange programme in which viewers are shown fragments of everyday existence, of salvaged reality, which is sometimes analysed critically, sometimes quoted by means of the therapeutic rhythms of a movement.

Safe Perimeter was initiated by artist Cristina David and art historian Alina Serban as part of the course “Clowns of Catastrophe: A Decade of Radicalism, Humour, and Identity Politics in Russia, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and the Baltic Countries”, held in the Photo-Video Department of the National University of Arts, Bucharest, with the support of PATTERNS Lectures. Safe Perimeter was conceived in the form of a publication and an exhibition, held between 23 April and 14 May at the Make a Point in Bucharest.

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Polska transformacja seksualna” / “Polish sexual transformation

“Polish Sexual Tranformation” is a collection of ten essays which offer an overview of topics related to sexuality, gender, Poland’s transformations, and practices of resistance to them. Issues such as a moral panic, asexuality, sexuality education, the question of coming, gender variance, and the burial of non-heteronormative individuals are discussed in the context of public, scientific and artistic discourses. The authors hope to fill a gap in the Polish publishing market by introducing a book on the intersections of gender, sexuality and nation.

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The visibility of the Roma. Practices of contemporary image production and reception

In this thematic issue of Apertúra (an online academic journal on film, visuality, theory) readers find many stories whose characters are the authors or the heroes they pay attention to. They are excellent theoreticians, artists or everyday people who had appeared in several academic, cultural scenes, but here they show up in new narratives, in the spaces of new struggles, that were formed (after bell hooks, feminist theoretician) by “the language and thinking used for self-recovery”. It is important to note, that this issue does not intend (to get) to know the Roma. But rather to reveal and analyze the system of relations that determine its ways and means in academic, artistic and public life, or even in some cases distort or control it by power devices. Although the publications here are on image production and reception, in many cases they are based on media, film and memory studies, visual anthropology, art theory and social sciences. There are remarkable encounters in references and trains of thoughts, as if the characters mentioned above were walking on roads that cross: we can witness important encounters.

Most of the essays analyse contemporary artistic products, events that – in my opinion – replace the overused phrases of public speech and of the discourses of sciences mentioned above. Thus they can help us to understand relations that we are usually only able to recognise. Hopefully our common effort to make them visible is not a rope of sand. They can help all those engaged scholars, artists or responsible citizens to make the “umpteen first step” (Sostar Group) toward our common goals. One of the most important ones could be to avoid dead ends and astray. Among the authors there are many scholars, artists and students who were participating in the PATTERNS Lectures course development at ELTE University (Andrea Pócsik).

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“Animals, gender, and culture: environmental, ethical, and critical perspective” is an anthology published in the PATTERNS Lectures Programme, which analyzes the complex relationship between humans and animals with both discursive examples, as well as those derived from visual and popular culture.
The first part is comprised of translations into Polish of such well-known texts as “Report on Animal Turn” by Kari Weil, appearing for the first time in Poland, while the second is composed of attempts made by critical researchers and students (participants of the course) who, using a variety of theoretical tools, as ecocriticism, gender and queer theory, postcolonialism, feminism, ecofeminism and posthumanism, create a variety of multi-faceted perspective of interpreting endowed with the relationship between gendered people and animals as well as culture and nature.
A look at the representations of animals in Polish culture through the prism of these theories produces interesting research material and presents new interpretations of cultural phenomena. This perspective gives also a possibility to go beyond the anthropocentric optics of many existing approaches in cultural studies.

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Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition

The anthology under the title Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition comprises fifteen texts which have been commissioned and previously published. The aim of this collection of essays is to monitor how exhibition – as a medium which functions among curators, artists and visitors as well as between different times and places – mediates, historicizes and re-formats the histories of the art of former Eastern Europe after 1989.

Since exhibition and curatorial discourse is an immensely complex and multilayered process which takes place not only in the local context but also within the global framework, the aim of this publication was to accumulate texts that would discuss various types, formats and genres of exhibitions in various institutions and in various places of Europe and the world. The concept of the publication was to go beyond the geo-political frame of Eastern Europe connected to previous regimes. The book is concerned with several overlapping themes and agendas, but the idea of the contemporary reconfiguring of the art historical canon through new curatorial practices, strategies, genres and formats is central. Renewed interest in the exhibition – as the main vehicle for contemporary art – has opened art historical discourse toward a new internationalism, transnational, transregional and global communication and collaboration, of which the former Eastern Europe is a part. New plural, parallel, horizontal, postcolonial narratives and innovative research concepts have recently emerged, while alternative models of institutional collaborations have been dissolving old hierarchies, divisions and stereotypes. ‘Eastern Europe’ is no longer an isolated region – it is linked with different parts of the world where exhibition curating and new curatorial principles enable connections to regions, places and people around the world.

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{roma} The contract to sell the ethnicity

Intersections I-III was created as a conclusion of the course development project (ELTE Department of Media and Communication) of PATTERNS Lectures.The event series temporarily resolved the contradictions inherent in engaged scholarship, which emerged earlier in the working process of the Roma Visual Lab.

The extended cinema event entitled Intersections I—Expanded Spaces—Half a Century of Gypsy and Redneck Manners, as approached by the members of the Independent Theatre Hungary, created the necessary system of connections at the Roma Parliament that paved the way for the subsequent symposium by “rewriting” (André Raatzsch) the films of the Balázs Béla Studio.

The aim of the symposium entitled Intersections II—Strategies 1957–2014 was, among other things, to invite for a collective thinking Roma intellectuals who have played and continue to play a defining role in the expected and indispensable process of institutionalization. In the presentations addressed to each other and to the audience of professionals, the guests portrayed the guiding principles of various periods and their personal intentions, supplemented by performative elements, in a colorful but systematizing fashion.

The event series in no way aimed to provide scholarly answers to the raised questions. It can be regarded as part of a process: its results and the extent to which these can be utilized (be it in a scholarly, artistic, or social manner) depends on the participants, as well as the attitude of the immediate and broader environment. This process, even before the results could become visible, was put into motion in the tranzit.hu space by the opening of the exhibition of the Sostar group, entitled {roma} The contract to sell the ethnicity (Intersections III). The disturbance created by the political art action—of an avant-garde orientation, in the classical sense—curated by André Raatzsch, is an integral part of continuing the work that has been started.

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State abed. International exhibition

The exhibition is the final event of the course “Feminisms and social changes in contemporary art practices”, at the Academy of Fine Arts University of Split 2012/2013. The course “Feminisms and social changes in contemporary art practices”, held by Natasha Kadin aimed at introducing and mapping the phenomena of feminisms and contemporary feminist art in Southeastern Europe during social and political changes over the last four decades, from the social realisms and pioneer new media art in the 1970s throughout the years of Yugoslav wars and time of transition, up to today’s neoliberal capitalistic society. The core of the course was the connection and intersection of art and social change during the last 40 years, with the special emphasis on feminist art and artists from SE Europe in global art environment.

Despite recent major research exhibitions such as “Gender Check” 2010 (MUMOK, Vienna and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw) and a growing number of gender related courses in universities in South Eastern Europe, the role of feminism and feminist art in contemporary art and society is still not investigated enough. What is needed is a theorization that can capture the post-Socialist environment and its complexities related to appropriation of the feminist discourse by the Communist ideology and its evolutions and various versions today. The lectures were rooted both in theoretical and historical discourses, but were focused on contemporary art production and artists.

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Anatomy of a Street

Anatomy of a Street was conceived to address the urban transformation of Central European cities, by focusing on one particular street or neighbourhood in the participating cities. These streets, functioning as ‘main streets’ in their neighbourhoods, like Király utca in Budapest, can be regarded as ‘mises-en-abyme’ of their city where one can find spectacular juxtapositions of traces of all major dynamisms of urban transformation: immigration, privatisation, public space renovation, gentrification, corruption, globalisation, the disappearance of public food markets, new architecture, civic engagement, etc. By parallel research and an interrelated mapping of the social and spatial metamorphosis of these streets in Budapest, Pécs, London, Warsaw and Belgrade, the project envisioned to investigate the transformation of urban ‘High Streets’ in Eastern and Western Europe, in respect and contrast to each other.

Anatomy of a Street is a nomadic project, unfinished by definition, which developed into a series of study trips – both driving and feeding back into our research. The publication consists of three chapters, (three separate volumes subsequently bound together), but originally published separately in three phases, as the documentation and diary of the research and related events, as well as essays and other contributions by academics, writers, artists and architects. From the back to the front: chapter one, Anatomy of a Street: An introduction, focuses on the Király Streets in Budapest and Pécs, providing the starting point for our exhibition on Church Street in Paddington, London, documented in chapter two: Revisiting Church Street; while chapter three, Central Europe Between Informal Interventions and Formal Organisations, is based on a travelling symposium between Budapest, Warsaw and Bratislava, and includes a small selection of papers and presentations delivered on the occasion of these meetings. In short, this publication is only one dimension of a research project comprising workshops, a travelling symposium, an exhibition and other events.

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PATTERNS Lectures supported a special issue of “Drugost” (Otherness), the student journal of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka. The goal was to encourage students who took the class “The Comparative History of the Culture of Memory” and participated in the study trip to sites of memory in the northern Adriatic region (Croatia, Slovenia and Italy) to prepare academic research papers and publish them in a journal with high academic criteria but edited by students themselves.

The professors acted as guest editors, but the bulk of the work was undertaken by students who were given considerable freedom in producing the final product. Award winning local graphic designers were chosen to give the journal its unique look, and the journal has been extensively distributed in Rijeka and internationally as a way to promote the Cultural Studies Department of the University of Rijeka.

The journal consists of eight essays that were chosen from among the submitted texts, along with an introduction and an extended interview with Katia Pizzi, a guest lecturer of the PATTERNS Lectures course in both 2011 and 2012. This special issue of the journal “Drugost” contributed to dynamic international cooperation, student exchange, professional development of scholars in the region, and high quality production of scholarly publications.

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Testimonies: In a Female Voice

The publication Testimonies: In a Female Voice summarizes the outputs of the course at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design during the winter and spring semester 2010/2011 initiated by PATTERNS Lectures. The book is a collection of twelve interviews with Czech and Slovak women artists and art historians. The interviews capture opinions and life paths of women coming from different generations. Among them is also the last interview with Jitka Válová, an interview with the professor Milena Bartlová or with the internationally recognized Serbian curator Bojana Pejić. Other interviewees were Ilona Németh and Veronika Bromová who represented Slovak and Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale. Futhermore the book contains interviews with respected artists and pedagogues Margita Titlová, Milena Dopitová and Michaela Thelenová. The answers of the women of the younger generation, like for example Martina Pachmanová, Lenka Klodová, Jana Štěpánová or Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, demonstrate that the role of gender in their work and views of art becomes more prominent.